


Witchcraft When Your Eyes

by Jane St Clair (3jane)



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-07
Updated: 2011-08-07
Packaged: 2017-10-22 09:02:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/236371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3jane/pseuds/Jane%20St%20Clair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three things that never happened to Ethan Rayne.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Witchcraft When Your Eyes

  
1\.  

The office's furnishings are probably replaced every half-decade  
or so, but they give the impression of having been in place since  
the days of Pitt the Elder.  Velvet and hand-carved nordic  
hardwood.  Sometimes he wonders if she likes it.  He suspects  
that she might prefer something cooler, perhaps brushed steel,  
with very little padding on every chair but hers.  The sheer  
imposition of her current chair would be hard to replicate,  
though.  A chair to stop the tide if ever there was one.

He remembers meeting her for the first time in Manchester.  She  
wore blue; he wore a badly-damaged suit that he thinks belonged  
to his grandfather.  Her eyes admired the line of the trousers  
long before they caught the wreck of the rest of him.  Nothing  
like compassion, but sharp interest, and he wasn't surprised to  
discover that no one stopped him when he came that night to her  
hotel room.  Only one dark-suited policeman waited by her door,  
and he carefully looked at nothing.

Six years since then.  She isn't always available, and he isn't  
always interested, but when he comes back from Amsterdam one of  
her tidy calling cards is tucked in with his waiting mail.  A  
small rune on the back that crackles power under his fingers.

He comes down by rail, crosses London on the Underground.  The  
ground beneath his feet whispers faintly of its life as Whitehall  
Palace.  Her office hisses pain and war for long minutes before  
settling around her.

The tension in her skin has always fascinated him.  Raw under the  
glossed surface in a way he respects.  Bare shoulders and clean  
bones, power in her that denies her age and muted public face.    
Order in her careful makeup; something fierce and primal and  
pain-loving underneath.  Like some early, barely-remembered woman  
who first whispered chaos across him.

He licks across her shoulder, down her back.  Along one thigh  
where the stocking is pulled back.  Older than he is, older than  
any woman he ever wanted like this.  Her power along his rib cage  
while he licks her more deeply.

They did this more often during the war.  It was so totally hers.    
He could feel it crackling in her, those remote South Atlantic  
islands ringing fire.  She fed him on that as much as on herself.    
Her small, careful gestures could crack whole continents.  Men  
ducked away from her as she passed.  He thinks she grew with  
every voice that ever cursed her.  Quiet and careful, like him,  
given to grand gestures only when she's sure the outcome will  
be the one she desires.  He wishes he could do the things she  
can.  Wonders if that's why she always tastes so good.

He wraps around her on the sofa, surrounded by books and a softly  
glowing map of the world.  Scarlet portions that are or were  
British.  The small, non-Argentinian islands she loves so much  
have fragile wards around them.  Her collar bone stands sharp  
under her dry skin.

He's standing by the window, watching London slither through its  
own glow, when the knock comes.  Naked skin in the room's half-  
dark.  Black-coated palace messengers.  Ethan watches the men  
flick eyes over him without any real attention.  Wonders who they  
think he is.

When he walks out, one of the messengers is there, crouched in  
the building's shadow, unwatched by any of the dozen policemen  
guarding her door.  He can feel her watching him when he takes  
the man's face in his hands.

2.

He wakes up naked, covered in insects.

It's been long enough that he's no longer sure of time.  This may  
have been going on for years.  For weeks at least.  This isn't  
the first or the seventh time he's woken chained to a tree limb  
and stripped to his skin.  Tattoos that he feels all the time  
crawl over his shoulders.

The young lovely who chained him last night doesn't return, but  
someone else does.  Throws him trousers and sandals and holds him  
by the throat while unlocking his manacles.  Someone spelled the  
chains thoroughly enough that he hasn't yet found a way to break  
himself loose.  Possibly it was the same person who enspelled  
*him* well enough that he can't walk away even when he's  
nominally free.

So.  This jungle, this day.  This group of lovely young Americans  
who shine even through the grime layers of the weeks or years  
they've been with him.  Breakfast is a generically-wrapped energy  
bar, thrown in the dirt at his feet.  The girl-child watching him  
eat fingers her gun idly in a way that suggests a plan of ritual  
mutilation far more than a simple execution-style shooting.

Even with the insects moving across him, he can feel the  
particular crawl of his tattoos.  Except for the scarred, naked  
patch where Eyghon's mark came free, nearly every inch of him is  
etched, now.  Runes he learned in childhood, done with a sewing  
kit and ball-point pen in his first night in this wet darkness.    
Better, more unique marks that he traded for in villages.  Every  
shaman in this rainforest keeps her own rituals against the  
nameless horrors.  Most of them will share for money or traded  
knowledge, or in response to the perfectly articulate threat that  
this group of beautiful young soldiers represents.

The insects slide across his face and into his hair.  One many-  
legged spirit crawls from his lower to upper eyelashes on its  
upward path, and the girl-soldier flinches.

He didn't call them, exactly.  But the first time they took him  
out of the icy bunker he'd been held in, his skin shimmered and  
things began crawling out of the earth toward him.  The sheer  
satisfaction of it was hard to resist.  He'd been sterilized,  
studied, and finally subdued, but he could still make himself  
filthy enough to make the sternest of them turn away.  These rare  
moments of privacy he cherishes.

Since then, insects.  Every night new ones who across him while  
he sleeps and mark their self-lost knowledge of the place on his  
mind.  The days with visitors arriving and departing, quiet or  
humming.  He's never been bitten.

The earth opens under his touch, and burrowers come up to slide  
under his fingernails.  Tell him of the Things that passed some  
days before.  They're closer every day.  He knows another pack of  
these young ones went looking for this particular demon, fought  
it and lost.  He braided pieces of their torn skins into a  
bracelet while the others buried the more substantial parts.

The girl kicks him.

"Get ready to move out, wizard."  She strokes the control pattern  
invisibly marked on his neck and he shudders.  She grins at him,  
wolfishly, for just a moment.

He puts on his sandals and starts walking after her.

  
3.

At night, the city carves itself out in fire.  Bombs that weigh  
more than he does come plunging out of the darkness and crack  
earth and buildings and medieval gates into places he's never  
been.  Light from the fires spreads all across the clouds.

He should be to be underground.  He has, like everyone in London,  
a designated shelter.  It's little more than a tunnel, filled  
with blankets and damp and mewling babies and mewling adults and  
he doesn't have to be there, really.  He can feel where the next  
bombs will fall; he stands a stone's throw out of the blast  
circles.

Feels the city break open.

There are other reasons for the good citizens of London to lock  
themselves in.  Demons loose and walking in the fire.  He thinks  
the Germans have wizards, now.  The first demons were  
opportunists, but there are too many, now.  He wonders whether  
Churchill is calling covens up from Sussex for assistance.

He isn't strong enough to fight the wizards in the planes, not  
yet.  He can feel them moving with the instincts She gave him.    
Her own presence in the house felt like that.  Charges left on  
metal.  Two days ago he picked up a cold shrapnel fragment and  
almost howled for Her absence.  Only.  Teutonic magic, not Hers,  
something new that has him climbing ever higher towards the  
blacked-out planes.

In the open mouth of the Underground's stairway, something horned  
and vaguely lionlike is eating the remains of a dog.  Its eyes  
are luminous black when it looks at him.

He says, "Did they call you?"

It shrugs.  Swallows loose intestines and steps toward him.  He  
holds steady until it's close enough to smell his breath, then  
whispers the only real incantation She taught him.  Small wards  
barely strong enough to throw it back, but they hold.

The language in which the demon snarls is infernal and distinctly  
Teutonic.  Ethan nods and ducks away, holding Her cloak of  
protection around him.  He settles into the shelter of a  
building's ruin and watches the fire.


End file.
